


Long Journey Home

by Senket



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, Slow Burn, mckirk minibang 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-31 14:52:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6474676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senket/pseuds/Senket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy and James Kirk's lives crash into each other at critical points over and over throught the years. Will they ever merge?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Journey Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ncc-seventeen-oh-pain](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ncc-seventeen-oh-pain), [Schizocheater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schizocheater/gifts).



Leonard Horatio McCoy is sixteen. According to his mother, he should be off gallivanting with the pretty young things in his class. He’s allowed to be a late bloomer, she says, but he shouldn’t be so serious all the time. He’s young, and he should enjoy it while he still has time. Freedom from responsibility. Freedom from real stress. Get out there, Len, enjoy yourself, I want to catch you kissing a girl in the sunshine.

Normal mothers are happy when their sons are captain of the baseball team, scoring As across the board (except in goddamn history) and already taking two AP classes in junior year, he tries to tell her. She swats him. ‘That is exactly what I’m talking about, mister.’ He won’t start dating Jocelyn Darnell for another two months, but even then Mrs. McCoy won’t be happy.

He ignores her anyway. Leonard’s father makes three generations of McCoy doctors, and Leonard has no intention of breaking the chain. He was born to be a doctor, and if his lineage doesn’t convince his mother, if the time he brought a bird with a broken wing home when he was three or the time he plastered bandaids all over Rover’s foot when he was five or the time he found a little girl crying from falling off her bike, elbow and knees scrapped up, and dragged her into the house to clean her wounds when he was seven didn’t convince her either, nothing would.

The hospital is his haven. He knows it’s considered strange, to enjoy being in a place filled with the dead and dying, with disease and fear and the hopelessness of the undiagnosed, the terminally ill, the ailing. Leonard doesn’t see that- he sees the healing, the resolve of life, the new births and the people digging their way out of self-made graves with single-minded strength. He sees a place where he can make a difference, where his life can matter. The hospital is a place where people heal, faith or no faith. Where he can use his own two hands to change someone’s life, irrevocably.

People who hate hospitals are the crazy ones.

Leonard Horatio McCoy is sixteen, and he knows the name of everyone on his father’s floor. They’ve watched him grow up, some of them. And some he’s watched go from scared, overwhelmed intern to stable, knowledgeable doctor, jealous and proud all at once. He wanders freely, as if he lives here.

He goes to ICU when he wants quiet. The ailing are so infrequently awake, and their visitors are usually pale and silent with grief. He’s fine with crying, it’s conversation he likes to avoid. The nurses tell him he needs a serious adjustment in bedside manner before he can be a good doctor, and he’ll never be a good nurse. He usually swears at them in return and they laugh, point proven.

Leonard is used to being the youngest wanderer on the grounds, so it immediately strikes him as odd to see two children, alone, sitting in the hard plastic chairs that line the wall across from viewing windows. The oldest, fourteen or fifteen, is hunched over a portable video game, blankeyed and mechanical. The youngest, eight or ten, has his feet under him, pressing sideways against his brother’s back.

His eyes lock immediately onto Leonard’s. They’re a startling blue, and the intensity of focus makes the teenager pause.

The older boy shifts to look up, expecting a doctor with information. The movement dislodges his sibling, who sways on the spot before crashing again on the other’s shoulder.

Startled, Leonard sheepishly helps himself to a disposable cup and pours himself some coffee from the nurse’s station. Strange, he thinks, that they’re here unattended. But, of course... ICU. Perhaps one of their parents... hopefully not both. He wondered, vaguely, where they’ll sleep tonight, how they’ll get home, if it’ll be alone. There isn’t much he can do about it, though. He shuffles out of ICU to make his way back up to surgery. He doesn’t belong here, today.

\--

Leonard is twenty. His home is theoretically in Mississippi right now, right off the Ole Miss campus in the same fraternity house his father slept in, but Jocelyn had a dance recital that dragged him back home. It’s Sunday afternoon and the recital isn’t till eight, though her call time was inexplicably at noon, so he’s back in his old haunt, visiting David McCoy.

The nurses are laughing at him. He hasn’t played baseball since he graduated, but he’s been eating crazy since he went off to school and the tall, skinny boy that left here fall of last year has developed muscle that has the coeds swooning, they’re sure of that. He spends most of his time in the library studying if he’s not going on late-night runs, so the coeds hardly know his name, he tells them. Nobody believes him, least of all Jennifer Treadway, whose baby brother still bitches about how Leonard stole Jocelyn away from him.

“How’s pre-med going?”

“Actually I’m getting a history degree,” he cheeks back, and Jennifer laughs so hard she has to lean on an empty chair to keep herself standing. Leonard grumbles and mutters something under his breath stormily, but they all know that means he’s pleased as punch. 

He’s a good kid, they all say. And he is, even when he pretends he’s not.

Nurse Campbell storms past both of them, muttering something about handcuffs. She twists her stethoscope between her fingers. Leonard follows, curious, as she stomps to the nurse’s station. She asks for backup, which he finds ridiculous. She’s a veteran of the hospital, and he’s never seen even the flightiest of patients win against the strength of her character, not to mention her lioness strength.

No one’s available, but he volunteers to help. She cocks an eyebrow at him, unimpressed. “Baby McCoy back to the roost, huh?”

“Just for the weekend, Shianne.” 

“Sure kid,” she snorts, fully expecting that the boy will apply to Mercy the moment he’s out of school. She accepts his help anyway. It’s not so much, it turns out, that the patient himself is infuriating. Len discovers that when he walks into the room behind her and finds a fourteen year old boy, whitefaced and silent. His jaw is set stubbornly, and he stares at the two walking into the room with luminously blue eyes, glazed over with the pain he’s not expressing.

“Hold his arm as still as you can,” she tells Leonard, fetching a pair of blunt-pointed scissors. He doesn’t need to be told to hold just below the joints. The boy’s skin feels clammy and cold under his fingers, a faint sheen of sweat making it gleam under the bright hospital lights. His limb is wrapped with layers of duct tape, and Len can just make out a wooden ruler stick out by the boy’s wrist.

Campbell cuts the shoddy splint from his arm as well as she can, wiping liberally with isopropyl alcohol to soften the tape’s adhesive. She moves slowly, trying to minimize the pain, glancing frequently at the boy’s face. “Tell me if it becomes unbearable,” she repeats several times, but the boy never speaks. He bites his lip white and bloodless.

Something about him grates in Leonard’s mind.

The boy starts to shake. He sucks breaths in, too fast and too shallow. At a loss, Leonard tries to distract him. Somehow he finds himself reciting every bone in the human body. Somehow it seems to work. The boy’s head tilts towards him, his eyes unfocused. He starts breathing in time with Leonard’s words.

Campbell peels the tape open. It takes what seems like forever before the whole thing is off, the boy’s skin white and gleaming, stark against the nurse’s dark, broad hands. Leonard’s eyes sting from the alcohol. With a final tug, she removes the last of the tape.

The boy’s arm, unadorned, is strange to look at. Both the bones in his lower arm have broken, twisting against each other. Without the tape they bulge against his skin. A clean break, he categorizes, that’s good at least. Distracted by the sight, but the strange excitement of his future unfolding before him, Len gently runs his thumb up the boy’s wrist towards the location of the break.

A sudden grip on his arm awakens him, and he looks up to find the boy staring straight at him, startlingly lucid. If feels like a bucket of cold water has been thrown into his face. 

Three hours later he’s still sitting with the boy and offering him water. ‘Jimmy,’ a name given eventually with great petulance, is sporting a brand-new short-arm cast. He kicks his feet and refuses to speak any further, and when Leonard tries to help him fill in his paperwork- something that should’ve been done ages ago, but it seems they were hoping for a legal guardian to do it for the teenager- Jimmy snatches it from him and fills it out expertly.

Leonard narrows his eyes, watching the boy awkwardly try to write with his hand in plaster before switching to his left hand instead. (The handwriting is barely different right to left.) That behavior rings warning bells, but it’s not his place to ask, so he sits with the blond in silence for another half an hour.

A blonde woman bursts into the room, a whirlwind of energy. She wraps herself around Jimmy the moment she spots him, gathers him into her arms and craddles him against him. She’s crying as she kisses his hair, and she calls him ‘baby’ seven or eight times, her thin hands rubbing his back. Jimmy hides his face against her shoulder. He starts to shake, as if something has gotten knocked loose in his chest, and it rattles out of his lungs in a low wail.

“What were you thinking?” the woman cries. “What in god’s name were you thinking?”

“I just wanted to find Sam.” Jimmy’s voice is thin and wet, reedy and high. Leonard, tremendously out of place suddenly, stands up and slinks over to the nurses.

“I hear your bedside manner is improving,” Doris tells him without raising her eyes from the screen in front of her.

“Doubt it,” he snorts, but all the same he looks over his shoulder at the boy and his mother, entwined and crying. There’s more than the fear of death in them.

He remembers, suddenly, what struck him as odd when the boy first looked at him, a vague memory from four years ago. The rigid lines of a fourteen-year-old boy’s back, holding himself stiff because he can’t lean on someone that isn’t there.

Jimmy and Sam. The older brother had looked....what, midteens? Away at college, maybe.

Jimmy’s grim silence, blow apart by a fearful mother, belays otherwise.

He’s late to Jocelyn’s recital, but she doesn’t seem to care. Her dressing room is full of flowers, none of which are from him.

\--

Leonard McCoy is twenty-four. UMMC, regrettably, didn’t have an accelerated six-year med program, but Leonard took a full load every summer, cutting out almost two years of schooling. Thus, he’s starting his residency at Mercy Teaching Hospital early. Absolutely nobody is surprised. Leonard eats lunch with his father on his first day as an official staff member in the center of the cafeteria and it feels like home. He’s glowing with pride, and this mood is so rare a look on him the nurses aren’t even teasing him about it, though they keep smiling when they see him. He’s too happy to worry what they’re saying after he passes.

Jocelyn’s pregnant, and that doesn’t hurt his mood in the slightest, though it’s about to seriously hurt his savings.

His first round in clinical passes in a haze of runny noses and weird aches. Most of his patients aren’t in need of anything more dire than antibiotics, because most of the idiots that refuse to come to the hospital until they’re practically dying go straight to the ER, sight unseen. He passes one or two on to more serious diagnostics and the rest go home with prescriptions or nothing at all- except for ridiculous bills, but he can’t do anything about that.

Someone comes through with serious shoulder pain that turns out to be a bad mattress and too much stress. He teaches them stretching exercises. Someone comes in with stomach pains, and it turns out they hadn’t realized they were pregnant. ‘It’s more common than you think.’ Someone comes in with a rash down their side they think is an allergic reaction, but it’s shingles. Someone gets dragged in by an exasperated, ponytailed woman that keeps switching languages to swear, and they-

Look so familiar.

Their eyes meet and linger for too long. The young man- one James Kirk, according to his file- narrows his eyes, gears turning in his head, and in Leonard’s, a light flicks on. Leonard flips through the file on his clipboard. He sees a broken arm six years ago, and he knows this is the boy.

Blood covers James’s forehead, even as he holds a wad of napkins against his head. Leonard recognizes the logo on the napkin. “Aren’t you too young to get in a bar fight?”

“I could be old enough,” the boy answers cuttingly. His companion snorts, shaking her head. Leonard turns the clipboard in his hands around and taps his pen again the boy’s birthdate pointedly. He purses his lip, looking sour.

He sits in an exaggerated slouch, but the nurse’s scribbling informs Len that his pulse is more rapid than it should be. Jim leans away when he steps closer. “Do you mind if I touch you?” Len asks tersely, more sarcastic than he should be. He sees the ‘no’ in a flash of blue eyes, but Jim looks over at his friend and deflates minutely. “Whatever.”

Len cleans the wound. It needs stitches. “Did you hit your head on a table corner?” he asks critically, thumbing the edge ever-so-lightly. He can’t feel texture through his gloves, but the skin is warmer than he expected.

“Sort of.”

“Someone slammed his head against a table edge,” the woman cuts in, her dark eyes staring directly at James.

He makes a rude gesture towards her but otherwise lets it lie as is.

“A fascinating story, I’m sure,” Leonard snorts. “You’re going to need stitches.”

James sits in silence while Leonard preps, and if he’s reading the look he’s sending the woman correctly, the boy is fuming. Leonard moves to apply a gel to the area and Jim jerks back immediately. His eyes are unreadable as he stares his doctor down.

Len has been around stubborn patients all his life. “Believe me, you don’t want sutures without this.”

“I’d rather bear the pain.” 

Leonard remembers a fourteen-year-old boy gritting his teeth as tape is peeled away from a broken arm. Taking the pain he doesn’t doubt. It’s the moving he’s worried about. He says so.

“I’d rather bear the pain,” James repeats tightly, his muscles taut. Leonard frowns. He comes closer again and James smacks his arm away. “Seriously don’t touch me with that!” His frown deepens.

“I saw that you’re allergic to salicylates. I’m using Rezil. It has a capsaicin base, you shouldn’t have a reaction.”

“’Shouldn’t’ is a fun word.” James grumbles. He’s still frowning, but he no longer looks angry. If anything, he looks confused.

“May I touch you?” Leonard asks. His tone is terse, the ‘now’ implied, and there goes whatever bedside manner he supposedly developed. James hesitates, glancing at his companion, but he acquiesces eventually.

“You must’ve had some pretty shitty doctors,” Leonard tells him quietly, “if you think we don’t check your allergies on file.” He doesn’t know what hospital the kid went to, though, because his opinion of everyone at Mercy is high. Well, except for Doctor Schneider, but he works in the morgue, so...

The woman holds James’s hand while Leonard works on sewing him up. At least James Kirk has some nice people taking care of him, so there’s that. Everyone needs someone that’ll force them to go to the hospital when they’re bleeding from the head.

\---

Leonard is twenty-seven and, though he’s not the only Doctor McCoy on the grounds of Mercy Teaching Hospital, he’s the only one active. Some days are okay. Most days are not. Some days he can’t breathe until he’s holding his baby girl. Most days he doesn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time.

He barely leaves the hospital. When he’s not working he’s sitting in the ICU, a forgotten cup of cold coffee by his elbow, scribbling away on a thousand notes. “This isn’t your field,” Doctor Steiner reminds him tersely whenever Leonard tries to talk to her about it. “We all want to save David, Len, but we both know medicine doesn’t work that way.”

“It did for Doctor Fleming!”

“You’re not going to discover the cure to ALS in a petri dish, Leonard!”

Jocelyn is getting colder by the minute. He bets it doesn’t help that sometimes he wants Joanna to sleep in bed with them, but she’s barely two and a half and he never sees her. He tries to take her out but she snubs him immediately, citing rehearsal, so he takes Jojo to the zoo instead. They see a sleeping silver-backed gorilla, and when Jojo says it ‘reminds her of grappa’, Leonard eyes fill immediately.

“What’s wrong daddy?” She’s so goddamn smart he doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he holds her tight in his arms and presses kisses into her ringlets of dark hair.

It’s there, strangely, that he runs into James. The boy’s in an olive jumpsuit with the zoo’s logo emblazoned on the back, and his eyes are blazing under his black baseball cap. It’s exceedingly hot in the sunlight, so James has the sleeves rolled up all the way, and Leonard can just make out a pair of fist-width bruises just under the edge of James’s mucking gloves. 

His gaze lingers too long, it seems, because James stares into him, his bright eyes flinty and defensive. He doesn’t move to hide the bruises. His chin comes up a fraction, defiant, and Leonard looks away. He never asks.

James’s eyes move to little Joanna, and he immediately changes. He whips off his cap and does an exaggerated bow with it. “My lady!” She giggles like mad.

“This is James-”

“Jim,” the boy corrects automatically, and though he’s grinning Len senses some tension in the speed of the answer.

“-Jim Kirk. Daddy met him at work once.”

“Wow!” She says. “Do you work at the hospital and the zoo.”

Jim smiles gentlemanly, coming closer and lowering his voice, sharing a secret. “I went to your dad because I had a booboo, and he made it super better.”

“Wow!” Joanna is always impressed by her dad helping people, and she beams brighter than she has all day, which is astounding. Joanna loves animals. His incredulity must be showing on his face, because Jim winks at him.

A dizzying day later, the sun is setting and Joanna is holding hands with an otter. How exactly Jim isn’t going to get in trouble for that, he doesn’t know. He has a hundred more pictures of him and his daughter than he did at the beginning of the day, though, so he’s thankful.

Jim kisses Joanna’s hand when they leave and she doesn’t stop talking about him the whole drive home, and then she tells Jocelyn all about it all the way through dinner. Jocelyn beams and laughs and coos over Joanna in all the right places, but after they put their daughter to bed she becomes a brick wall.

“You made his booboo better, did you?”

“What?”

It doesn’t make any sense.

\---

He sees Jim again four days later. Instead of a faded yellow, the bruises on the boy’s wrists seem to have deepened. Leonard is a little more preoccupied with the way his brain is swelling inside his head, though. He was always meant to be a surgeon, they say, because his hands never shake, but after this particular surgery, they are.

He’s not afraid, he’s angry. Pissed. Why the fuck didn’t he ask? What kind of goddamn doctor is he? He knows Jim needs to be pressed, damnit.

The kid wakes up within hours, which is a relief at least. The anger burns in his chest anyway. He goes to Jim to give him the details of the surgery, like he’s supposed to, but instead finds him involved in a staring match.

He breaks it with: “whatever happened to your friend?”

It seems like such a non sequitur it snaps Jim out of his reticent stubbornness. He frowns quizzically, thinking back. “...Do you mean Nyota? She went to college.”

“What the hell were you thinking?”

Jim’s fingers curl around his wrist. They look strangely dainty against purpled flesh. “It was consensual. Things just got a little out of hand today.”

“Brain swelling is a little more than ‘out of hand,’” he snaps. Jim glares at him.

“You don’t know shit about me.”

“You hate hospitals, you hate doctors, people have to force you to take care of your own health, you like children and animals, you’re allergic to two forms of analgesic- one topical one oral- you broke your arm when you were 14, you have an older brother, you’re actually old enough to drink now, but barely, you’ve been trawling bars since you were at least 19, and you’re a stubborn son of a bitch.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“And I bet you like that about me.”

Jim snorts at that, loudly and crassly, but it shuts him up. Len counts it as a victory.

\---

Leonard McCoy is twenty-seven and the remark Jocelyn made two months ago comes into stark clarity when he comes home early to Clay Treadway’s truck in his driveway. He turns back around and goes right back to work.

“Thank god you’re here,” they say, “there was just a six-car pileup on the highway.

Jim Kirk is in pieces on his operating table and McCoy hates the whole goddamn planet.

\--- 

Leonard McCoy is twenty-eight and his life is over. He’s the only Doctor McCoy at Mercy Teaching Hospital. He fears he will be the last. Joanna might become a doctor, but it won’t be under his name. Not anymore.

He sells the house. Jocelyn doesn’t want it and he definitely doesn’t care for it. He gets an apartment within a ten minute walk to Mercy and sells his car, too.

He gets drunk at the Hanging Gardens whenever he doesn’t have work the next morning, hiding behind the wall of draping ivy in a dark corner.

One night he finds his booth occupied. The shock makes him feel strangely hysterical. And then the usurper stands, presumably to go to the bathroom or something, and when they turn around Leonard is confronted with startling blue eyes.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Jim’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Forget it,” he mutters, stumbling past the younger man to sit in the very corner. He drops his head on the table.

“Hey,” Jim calls, indignant. “This is my table!”

“Share it.”

“Maybe I have people coming!”

“Do you?”

“As a matter of fact-”

“Go seduce them someplace else.”

“Hey baby.” The new voice is dark and slow as molasses and so smarmy Leonard practically gags on it. He looks up just to pull a face at the newest intruder. The possessive way the man loops his arm over Jim’s shoulders rubs him all wrong.

Jim glares at him. To silence him, no doubt. Leonard snorts. Like he gives a fuck. Jim can make all the bad decisions he goddamn wants. It’s not like he can talk. He thought he made all the right decisions, but he’s still here, getting drunk behind plants with no wife, no father and no daughter.

Hell, at least he still has his career. Jocelyn was always a wildcat, and god knows she tried to sweeten the hospital staff to her side, but there are some benefits to having practically grown up there.

He drinks more than he means to that night, persuaded by the soft conversation he can’t quite overhear from Jim and his ‘suitor’. He’s pretty sure they have sex in the booth from the strangled gasps there for a while. He gets to work for his four pm shift hung over and hating himself a little more than usual. Nobody comments on his snappiness anymore, though the nurses’ jokes about his bedside manner are more jibes. Ocassionally, they outright tell him to knock it the fuck off before he gets fired for real.

Jim gets brought in by his ponytailed friend at about six. She looks as furious as he feels. Apparently Jim was supposed to meet her for lunch at two, and after getting fedup waiting for him, she went to his place and found him unresponsive.

She has no idea how long he’s been that way. She keeps wiping away angry tears. First-hand experience tells him this isn’t the first time, but her reaction tells him perhaps it’s worse than he initially assumed. Far worse.

Jim is sent into ICU. He wakes up unexpectedly in the middle of the night and McCoy gets called by the nurses. Apparently he’s being a shithead and trying to get released. Jim groans when he appears.

“Well if it isn’t my personal grim reaper.”

“I am a fucking guardian angel, if anything,” he snarls, snatching a pen away from the boy. “I have personally resuscitated you at least twice.”

“Oh, at least.” Jim rolls his eyes.

“Get back in bed.”

“Yeah, not doing that.”

“You are liable to collapse get back in bed.”

Jim spins around and fixes him with a dark glare. “Make me.”

“Fine.” He grabs the boy’s arm and drags him back to his room, pushes him on the bed with far more force then he meant to use. “You’re staying overnight for observation at the very least.”

“Fuck you.”

“Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you? Do you goad people into shoving your head through walls? Is that how you keep ending up here?”

“So what if it is?”

“Stop trying to get yourself killed!”

“Stop stopping me!”

Leonard falls silent. He straightens slowly. His hand drops to his side. He grits his teeth. “...No.”

Jim’s brain seems to catch up with his argumentative tongue. He turns red and then white. For the first time, he withers under Leonard’s gaze, lowers his head. The boy folds up like a child, leans his head against his knobby knees.

“People miss you when you die, kid.” He has no idea what the hell he’s saying, why he’s saying it. He feels like he could blow off the face of the earth and no one would notice half the time. But he knows it’s right. It exists in his skeleton. He’s on the earth to change fucking lives, and no boy is going to stand in his hospital and dare him to let them drive face-first into a canyon. “Your lady friend was cried for an hour.”

“Uhura crying?” he mutters half-heartedly. He sinks slowly until he’s a puddle on the mattress, tension leached from him by exhaustion. “Hard to believe. Are you sure it wasn’t frustration from not being able to hit me?”

“Oh, she wanted to hit you alright,” Leonard tells him awkwardly.

He inches closer. He shouldn’t. They’re not friends. He’s this boy’s doctor. Jim’s eyes are luminous in the darkness, incredible. Leonard feels a lump in his throat. Their lives are tangled, he can see that, and even without ever having been particularly religious, it’s bizarre to believe this all to be a coincidence. The city is by no means that small. He sits at the edge of the mattress, looking past the glass window to the row of chairs where he first saw the other man over ten years ago.

He feels ancient and unimaginably young, all at once. “I don’t know what to tell you kid. I’m not doing so great myself.”

“What about Jojo?”

He wonders if anyone calls her that anymore. Jojobean. Baby bean. If it’s all long gone, if she won’t even remember anyone ever called her that.

“Not even for birthdays and holidays.”

“Harsh.”

He shrugs weakly. The court ruled him incompetent to raise a child alone, and his schedule too hectic. He wouldn’t be able to give her any stability. And his weekends, so rarely free. The adoption papers are sitting on his coffee table, waiting for a signature.

There’s not enough alcohol in the world.

“I’m starting to think I need to leave this city,” one of them says, and somehow Leonard doesn’t even know which of them it is.

“Ditto.”

\---

Leonard is twenty-nine and he’s on a plane to San Francisco. It sounds a lot less impressive than it is, but he’s terrified of flying. They haven’t left the gate yet, and he’s already got his head between his knees, breathing hard. Someone sits next to him as he dry heaves. “I may throw up on you.”

“I think these things are pretty safe.”

His head shoots up. He stares incredulously. Jim smirks.

“What the fuck?”

“God if I know, Bones.”

“...Bones?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jim laughs, sprawling. “I’ve called you that in my head since my arm.”

“Huh.” Why not. New name, new place. Old baggage, apparently.

“So why are you going to San Francisco?”

“Why the hell do you think, kid?”

“You could be visiting someone.”

“I’m not.”

“Cool. ...So can I name you my physician or what?”

He sighs, exasperated. The boy is exhausting. But he’s looking for a new start too. That’s- reassuring. And it’ll be nice to have someone around that understands him. Leonard’s never been anywhere new. Ole Miss didn’t really feel like not-home. “Sure. Why the hell not. You’ll have to wait till Monday, though.”

“Monday?”

“First day, new job.”

He doesn’t tell Jim that, as a neurosurgeon, he’s not really anyone’s personal physician. The kid’ll figure it out. Probably. The airplane jostles and suddenly Jim is holding his hand. He flashes him a look of panic and the boy smiles, patient and sunny, and squeezes his fingers.

\---

Leonard is thirty-six. He hasn’t stepped foot in Mercy in seven years. He hesitates in the doorway. Leonard is thirty-six and he feels like he’s standing on a precipice. The building is bigger than he remembers.

He’s in town on conference. He was supposed to see Joanna in person for the first time since the divorce was finalized, but she broke her arm. He boggled when he heard, astounded by the circularity of the world.

It’s strange, so strange, being back. The San Francisco bustle is so different, and Georgia feels alien now. Another lifetime ago. His baby is twelve and the hospital he grew up in isn’t his.

He swallows a lump in his throat.

Someone takes his hand. He turns his head.

Jim steps into his space, curls an arm around his shoulders. “Doing okay?” He hesitates, then nods. Jim draws him closer, kisses him sweetly. “It’s weird, right? I know, Bones.”

The blond has a penguin plushie tucked under his arm and a framed photo of tiny, itty-bitty Joanna, as tall as the live penguin next to her and beaming toothily, leaning against a kneeling Leonard’s torso. He has a ring on his finger that’s been there long enough to leave a white mark if he removes it. He’s had Leonard’s heart in his hands for a long time now.

...Well, he shares it with Joanna, but he doesn’t seem to upset about it.

“Shall we go?”

“You lead, Jim.”

His life is changing.


End file.
